


beyond the scope of warranty

by motherherbivore (Airheart)



Category: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Genre: Anxiety, Dysphoria, Gen, POV First Person, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-20 19:52:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17628623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Airheart/pseuds/motherherbivore
Summary: In which there's a birthday coming up and Murderbot has problems.





	beyond the scope of warranty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Artemis1000](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artemis1000/gifts).



> i set out to write a nice little treat and it turned into almost three thousand words of me projecting onto an anxiety-riddled murderbot, i hope you like it anyway! it's been a hot minute since i read books 2-4 and i don't have them on hand, so i apologize for any inconsistencies OTL

I know what birthdays are. 

I'm disinterested, not stupid—I know what birthdays are, and I know about birthday parties, too. I've seen a few, on the rare occasion that one of my clients had a birthday while I was contracted to them. (I had to be there for security reasons. I was not invited.) Even in depressing little research facilities, where everything was silver and white and sterile, they'd manage to get junk food and presents. Sometimes the birthday-haver wore a silly little hat.  Some birthdays are extra special, depending on the age they’re turning (okay, I'll admit that I don't really understand that aspect—are they celebrating a nice round number, or celebrating that they made it to that age?). I get it—humans tend to enjoy living, so they celebrate another year of it, every year.

I know. I just don't care.

So you'll have to forgive me if I go a little nuts on the next person who tries to explain birthdays to me, no matter how well-meaning they are. One of Mensah's daughters’ birthday is coming up, I forget how old she’s turning but it’s a big deal for them, and there's a lot of relatives staying on the property to help with party preparation, and I can't leave my room without running into some sweet little aunty who thinks I've never known kindness. Not that I leave my room very often anyway, but it would be nice if I could. The big plate-glass window in my room overlooks the garden, and sometimes I like to hang out there instead of just looking at it. Plus, Mensah doesn't like it when I don't come out for a long time—she'll leave me alone for up to three weeks (the standing record is 20 days), but she gets upset after that and I can only pull the "I'm still assimilating" card so many times. We had a pretty big argument about it last time. I'd love to say that I don't care about that, either, but the truth is that it kind of shook me up, and I think I made her cry.

Which is the only reason I'm even considering making an appearance at her daughter's birthday party, and that possibility is slipping further and further away with every person who asks me, "Do you have a birthday?" (I don't. I have a manufacturing date stamped somewhere on my inorganics, which I haven't looked at and refuse to look at.) Being a construct, being a SecUnit sucks, but it’s not like I was kept in a moldy dungeon and tortured. I like cubicles, and, well, getting hurt was just part of the job sometimes. It’s in the past, anyway. And I have Mensah to thank for that. So yeah, I’m considering going to a party for her. The universe isn’t making it easy.

My biggest hangup, besides everything, is that this is the first time I'd be meeting a lot of Mensah's extended family, and I still don't know how to introduce myself. No one else knows how to introduce me, either. Nine months, a week, and two days, and we still haven't figured out what my name is. Rin, Eden, all those names that I tried on and shed like a ripped suit skin... nothing fits. 

"I don't understand why this is so difficult," Anaya, one of Mensah's wives, said at some point. She didn't mean that  _ I  _ was being difficult—it was weird, trying to find a name for me, and everyone felt it. It wasn't anyone's fault.

Still, I'd replied, "Sorry, but you know how SecUnits weren't supposed to have names." I know I sounded like an asshole. But, listen, I'm only good at two things: shooting things, and making people uncomfortable. I'm not supposed to shoot things around Preservation, so the "making people uncomfortable" skillset really shines through. 

I'm extremely lucky that Mensah and her family are putting up with my bullshit. I know. I know.

We've tried about nine names in the past two weeks. Luna made me want to claw my face off the least, but it still isn't right. The last one we tried was Forrest, and, long story short, that's why I'm hiding extra hard in my room now. (There's no external difference between me being in my room like usual, and me hiding "extra hard" in my room. It's all in how I'll react if someone tries to come in. Right now, I'd probably rip a panel off the wall and crawl inside.) 

I don't know what about it set me off. I don't think it's a terrible name—I think Mensah's husband borrowed it from a true crime serial, which I'll probably add to my watchlist when I've calmed down. It's just not...  _ my _ name. Nothing is. Maybe it is a stupid name. Maybe I'm overstimulated with names right now, and Forrest just happened to be the name we were trying out when I hit the breaking point. It's complicated. Worse, it's  _ feelings _ . I don't even want to string those two words together and create the worst phrase of all time. 

I’m sitting on the couch in my room, a little two-seater by the window, and I’ve been aimlessly scrolling through my stockpile of movies and serials for an hour. I’m not actually paying attention to any of the titles. I’m just trying not to think about how confused one of the husbands looked when I just stood up and walked away in the middle of his sentence. I didn’t even try to look at Mensah as I left. I almost imagine the look she must have had on her face, and shake my head sharply. My organics start to itch. Am I breaking out in fucking hives? 

No. The organic parts of my arms are smooth. I pull up my shirt to check my chest and sides, too, just in case, but there’s nothing there. Nope, it’s all in my head. I wish I could rip it off.

There’s a little knock at the door, and I’m halfway to making a me-sized hole in the wall before I load up the security feed and see Mensah standing outside. She’s holding a pile of colorful clothing, and she looks directly into the camera milliseconds after I connect to the feed. It’s a little bit uncanny, but she just knows me that well. 

Have you ever been comforted and discomforted at the same time? It’s bad. 

For a solid seventeen seconds, I just stand there. Part of me wants to ignore her until she goes away, part of me wants to let her in, and there’s a tiny bit of me that’s just thinking of how much force it would take to break my own hand, which confuses me. My self-preservation protocols aren’t all that great, but self- _ mutilation _ is kind of unusual, even for me. 

I probably should let Mensah in. 

I send the command to open the door, and sit back down on the couch, shoving my hands under my thighs. Mensah comes in, doesn’t look at me yet, just carries her pile of clothing to the bed. She drops them in a heap on top of the duvet, then turns to face me.

“You’re definitely not a Forrest, then,” she says. It’s not funny, so she’s not smiling, and that’s the only reason I don’t pull out some smartass comment. Mensah is the only person I’ll let do that sort of thing. Anyone else would have gotten the smartass comment. Instead, I don’t say anything at all. “Are you okay?”

I’m still thinking about my shitty body and cheap construction. Whatever problem I’m having, has moved past the name thing, I think. “It’s whatever,” I say. 

“Naming anything is hard,” Mensah says. She sits down on the sofa next to me, and feeling the cushion sink with her weight, feeling her body heat—I want to bite my arm off. It’s weird. I've never had such violent urges in response to such mundane stimuli. I don't know what else to do, so I start setting up a hardcore defrag and optimization. When in doubt, just... run a shitton of diagnostics and clean-up. My performance reliability drops a percent and a half.

“It took months to come up with names for our children,” she continues. “And they weren’t born yet. They didn’t have any input, not like you do now. Can I put my hand on your arm?”

The one I’m currently imagining chewing through at the elbow? “No.”

Mensah barely reacts, she just rests her hands neatly in her lap. She’s so casual, so normal about it, because to her, it’s just Murderbot being Murderbot—I only let her touch me about half the time she asks, anyway. It’s just highlighting how fucking weird I’m being. God, I hate existing. 

“Tell you what,” she says, “we’ll leave the name thing alone. I won’t introduce you to anyone—I’ll introduce  _ them  _ to  _ you,  _ and then the ball is in your court. No name needed.”

“They’ll ask what my name is.”

“I’ll tell them not to.” I can sense her subvocalizing as she composes a message for the family feed. “There. We’ll worry about it another time, when everyone is less stressed out.”

We. Everyone. For some reason, I keep hanging onto the plurals, picking them out and highlighting them in my mind. It’s making my head ache, and that’s when I realize what’s happening to me: I’m having a breakdown. It’s been a while since I last had one—usually I just dissociate and stare blankly ahead, ignoring everything around me and walking away from anyone that tries to engage me. The urges to tear my body apart are new. It all comes from the organic parts of my brain, so there’s really nothing I can do about it. Thanks, manufacturers, making me smart enough to be depressed was a great idea.

“Okay,” I say flatly. I want her to leave, but also I don’t. I look at the pile of clothes on the bed. “What are those for?”

“Clothes for the party.” Mensah gets up and goes over to them, starts separating the pile so that I can see the individual pieces—soft, richly colored tunics, with gold or silver embroidery around the hems. I’ve seen Mensah and her family wearing similar outfits in photos around the house. These ones must be from Jaywant’s closet, Mensah’s tallest husband and the only one who’s around my height, although I still have about two inches on him. The idea makes my skin crawl, even though I like Jaywant. 

Mensah holds up a long blue tunic, stretching her arms above her head so that it doesn’t drag on the floor so much. “This is the fun part of planning a party, even one you don’t particularly want to attend,” she says. She smiles nicely at me, and I want to die. “Jaywant said you can keep any of these, too, if you like them.”

I just look at her. She looks back, then at the tunic. She lowers it and carefully folds it in half, tucking the end over the bottom of the hanger so that it stays in place.

“We want you to be there,” she says (there’s that  _ we  _ again), “but you don’t have to come. I know it’s a lot.”

I open my mouth to say something, but I don’t actually know what to say and all that comes out is a sort of  _ huh  _ sound. I clamp my mouth shut. Mensah looks at me, just for a second, then starts gathering up the tunics, making sure that they’re all properly on their hangers.

“You still have a couple of days to decide,” she says. “I’ll leave these here.” She goes to open the closet door, and I get a sudden feeling of  _ don’t do that.  _ I straighten up, craning my neck to see past her and into the closet, trying to think of what I’d hidden in there. Did I hide anything in there? Mensah pushes all my monochrome cotton shirts aside and hangs the tunics up on the rod beside them. “You can look at them later. They’re all fine to wear for the party, so—” She stops, looking at the closet floor.  

Oh, right. I look up at the ceiling. My backpack.

Mensah stares at it for a second before she leans down to pick it up. Of course she knows what it is, even before opening the front pocket and seeing the hard currency card, the fake ID (not Rin, not Eden, someone entirely new). There are clothes and a gun in the big pocket, boxes of ammo in the sides. I’d tossed a few random human items in too, just in case—soap, a washcloth, nail clippers, whatever else you’d get free on a first-class transport ride. Enough to make it look like the bag belonged to a human on the run instead of a construct on the run. I’d put it together the first week I lived here and haven’t touched it since. 

Still. It’s not a reassuring find under the best circumstances, and I wouldn’t say that these were even kind of good circumstances. Anything involving me usually isn’t.

She breathes deeply through her nose, like she does when her children are trying her patience, and she slowly puts the bag back, closes the closet door. I don’t know what the fuck to say, so I just wait for her to get mad at me. Keeping a go-bag is a pretty dick move when this family has done nothing but try to accept me. We’ve fought about my commitment/trust/honesty/everything issues before and made little progress, so I brace myself for another one of those arguments. Mensah usually gets the first word in. She’s just better at talking than I am, and my sarcasm abilities are weakened when I’m with her. I can sense her subvocalizing, rather aggressively, and wait for her to snap.

Instead, she asks in a quiet voice, “Are you in a place to address this right now?”

She understands me. I can’t handle it right now—everything is compounding on me, and between the (angry? sad? hurt? I wish it were that easy to categorize) tone of her voice and my increasingly violent self-destructive thoughts, I just can’t take it. I swing my legs up onto the couch and lay down with my face pressed against the back cushions instead of answering her. I don’t even hook up to the security feed to watch her as she heads for the door. I just listen to the hesitance in her footsteps, then the hiss of the door sliding open. She pauses there.

“I’m not asking you to commit,” she says. “I’m just asking you to relax.”

Then the door shuts behind her, and I stand up and shove myself under the bed. I’d stubbornly insisted on keeping the bed, instead of outfitting the room with a nice cubicle—part of it was me not wanting to let go of the smug little  _ fuck you  _ feeling I still get every time I use human furniture, and a lot of it was me trying to convince myself that I wouldn’t stay here long so they shouldn’t renovate. I regret it now. The little bit of space between the bed and the floor is tight, but not comforting like a cubicle. 

The manufactured part of me says I’m being irrational and annoying. I’m overreacting, like I do to everything that involves feelings or relationships. More than that, it’s unnatural—I don’t know how to be a person because I was never supposed to be one. Most constructs are made, used up, and recycled within ten or fifteen years. I’m approaching twenty. I should never have gotten this far, and I sure as hell shouldn’t be where I am. My inorganic parts are just proof that everything about me is wrong.

Meanwhile, the organic part is still trying to get away from the inorganic part. My chest and shoulders and head all ache. It wants to cry. I’ve never cried before, and I do not fucking plan on doing it now.

I don’t want to listen to my thoughts anymore. I close my eyes, connect to the house camera feed, and slip into the security of watching everything through a body that’s not my own. 


End file.
